Bees and Sick Days

Comparing two front-page articles in today's New York Times shows the paper applies a double standard when it comes to evaluating costs that might be passed along to consumers.

In one article, about deaths of honeybees, the Times reports, "Bee shortages pushed the cost to farmers of renting bees to $200 per hive at times, 20 percent above normal. That, too, may translate into higher prices for food." In this article, an increase in the cost to a producer of an input (renting a beehive) gets passed along to consumers in the form of "higher prices for food." The article doesn't assume that the cost just comes out of the farmer's (presumably vast) profits, nor does it consider that in the overall cost of operating a farm, including such things as labor, equipment, fertilizer, water, energy, and farmland, the cost of renting a beehive is a relatively small piece of the picture.

In the second article, about a deal reached in the New York City Council to require businesses in the city with at least 15 employees to provide full-time workers with at least five paid sick days a year, there's no mention or consideration at all of the possibility that the cost of this benefit would "translate into higher prices" for the customers of the businesses subject to the new law.

In other words, cost increases imposed by the allegedly devastating effects of corporate-produced pesticides on the bee population "translate into higher prices for food," yet cost increases on restaurants or retailers imposed by New York City Council Members under the sway of what even the Times calls "a raw display of political muscle by a coalition of labor unions and liberal activists" magically have no such effect.